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Hellow there…

I wish you a merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2018. May your holidays be filled with joy, togetherness, celebrations and fulfillment. May your new year be filled with hope, energy and awesomeness.

I want to tell you how thankful I am for all your support in this year. Each time you click, visit, read, comment, share, view, listen, purchase, subscribe, follow, question, discuss or email, my heart is filled with gratitude and happiness. Thank you for all the love and support. 2017 has been another amazing year in Chandoo.org journey and I owe this to you.

‘Tis Friday and it is too hot in my home office to stand and type a longish post. So, let’s keep this skirtish (short and pretty).

How would you calculate long service bonus?

Let’s say you are HR manager at BigLargeInc. and you are looking at Julia’s service details. You have her employment start date, current date, her leave without pay details, as shown below.

You need to calculate how many days of continuous service Julia had (ie total service – duration on leave without pay). How would you write the formula?

Time for another round of unconditional love. Today, let’s learn about conditional formatting top tips. It is one of the most useful and powerful features in Excel. With just a few clicks of conditional formatting you can add powerful insights to your data. Ready to learn the top tips? Read on.

Imagine you are the first officer at ship terminal αε974F1 on remote planet Alderaan. Your job involves looking at terminal log to see anomalies in time space continuum. So one day after getting to work late, thanks to crazy traffic on the floating super way in your settlement, you are looking at latest terminal log for αε974F1 on Excel (of course Excel, what else are you going to use? Notepad?!?) and want to check all the records logged at 7 AM on any day. You don’t have all the time in universe to filter records one at a time. You don’t want to write a formula or something else as it is too early in the morning and the nearest Starbucks is 7 light years away. So what would you do?

Use filters of course.

Time for a quick residential break from all the Excel awesomeness. I have an exciting news to share with you all.

We have a home in New Zealand.

In the middle of 2016, we moved to New Zealand. We have been living in windy, lovely and beautiful Wellington ever since. After renting a house and sampling life in NZ, we decided to call it home for next few years. The next natural step is to purchase a home and move in.

We had to switch power providers soon, so I started reviewing the options. There are heaps of providers in New Zealand and each offer a ton of different plans. Some offer welcome bonus or credit worth up to $ 200. Other offer straight forward rates. Some others offer discount if you sign up for both electricity and gas with them. So how do you decide which one is better for you?

Using Excel of course.

The result is awesome. I ended up saving more than $1000 with a simple model. Puzzled? Curious? Check out this short but powerful video tut.

Yesterday, my mate from across the ditch, Hui posted about conditional rank formula (RANKIFS) using awesome SUMPRODUCT

Of course, not everyone can whip up a sumproduct formula like that. On a scale of One to Hui of Excel awesomeness, you would need to be at least an H to write sumproduct or countifs formulas shown in that post. So does it mean, you can’t conditional rank if you don’t know your X from L?

Don’t worry. We got you covered. You can still get your conditional ranks, without inception level array formulas. Simple, use pivot tables instead.

Time for some statistics and charting fun. Let’s learn all about histograms and Pareto charts in Excel 2016. You will learn

• What, why and when?
• How to set up and customize histograms
• How to use Pareto charts?
• How to create dynamic histograms?
• Creating histograms in old Excel (2013 or prior versions)

Sounds interesting? Let’s get started then.

Time for a quick formula finesse check. Let’s say you have a number in A1. What formula can you use to find out if it has duplicate digits.

For example, if A1 has 123405, then answer should be FALSE

and if A1 has 123455, then answer should be TRUE

Go ahead and post your answers (formulas, VBA or M script) in the comments section.

Before we begin:

Today is the last day for enrolling in our Power BI Play Date. Don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity to learn, use and benefit from Power BI at your work. Check out my online class and sign up before the doors close at midnight. Click here.

Let’s get our Simpsons on then.

D’oh, How often Homer says his favorite things?

Here is the visualization to explore Homer’s (and other character’s) favorite sayings in 27 years worth of Simpsons episode. Click on the image to play.

We are in the midst of my Power BI Play Date course launch. I have opened the enrollments for this program last week and there is a tremendous response to this program.  To celebrate the new course launch and show you the lighter side of it, let me share a few breathing exercises built in Power BI.

Time for some good, old fashioned VLOOKUP love. Let’s say you are writing VLOOKUP()s to get data from an unusually fat table, ie one with heaps of columns. You want to get to lookup ID in first column and get thingamajig in what is that column number. Well, better get counting from 1 and after 19 seconds and lots of squinting you arrive at column number 53 – which has thingamajig. 

If this sounds like your VLOOKUP routine, check out these three amazingly simple tips to save some time and effort with your lookups.

Yay, finally our first ever full length Power BI tutorial is up. In this 30 minute video tutorial, learn how to get some data in to Power BI and make a quick report to understand it. We will be creating this.

Let’s get started then.

Hello,

I have an exciting news for you. After learning and playing with Power BI for more than a year, I would love to share all this awesomeness with you on a play date. Of course, you don’t have to pack your sleeping bag and tooth brush. You can join me on this play date from the comfort of your couch and PJs. Stoked? Read on.

Introducing Data from Hell:

Watch out, its data from hell. In this new video series, we are going to examine some nutty, frustrating and fun data reshaping challenges and solve them using Excel. We will use Power Query, Formulas, VBA or other features as needed to free this data from damnation.

For our first installment, let’s reshape unevenly spaced list of values to a table.